Editor’s note for Wednesday, January 12, 2022

My thoughts today:

China’s most famous international relations scholar, Yán Xuétōng 阎学通, gave a talk on teaching “post-00s” students — those born after 2000. A WeChat account called IR New Youth (国关新青年) wrote up a summary of the talk (in Chinese). Here is a trend that worries him:

Mr. Yan believes that post-00s college students often have a strong sense of superiority and self-confidence, often view other countries with a “condescending” mentality, and view international affairs with “wishful thinking,” believing that China can easily achieve its foreign policy goals.

They often view the world in a dichotomy between China and foreign countries, regard other countries as all the same, and consider universal human values ​​such as peace, morality, fairness, and justice as a unique tradition in China, and believe that only China is just and innocent. Other countries, especially Western countries, are “evil.” Westerners have a natural hatred of China.

“According to the government, ‘COVID zero’ is no longer China’s policy goal,” reports Bloomberg. Instead, it is “dynamic clearing,” which means acknowledging that there will be some spread of the virus, but taking strong and strict actions to stamp out local outbreaks as they occur.

It is an acknowledgement, perhaps, that coronavirus transmission is going to be impossible to stop. But as a strategy, it doesn’t sound any different from COVID zero!

Our word of the day is dynamic clearing (动态清零 dòngtài qīnglíng).

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—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief